Hand off Dialog Management to ACDL

Note: Sign in to the developer console to build or publish your skill.

Note: Alexa Conversations currently supports the following locales:
• GA: en-US, en-AU, en-CA, en-IN, en-GB, de-DE, ja-JP, es-ES, es-US
• Beta: it-IT, fr-CA, fr-FR, pt-BR, es-MX, ar-SA, hi-IN

Alexa Conversations Description Language (ACDL) can handle all or part of the dialog management for a skill that uses intent-based dialog management. To hand off dialog management, send a Dialog.DelegateRequest directive in response to a request from Alexa. The details of this directive depend on whether you want to switch from the intent-based dialog manager to ACDL, or vice versa. Either way, you can save session attributes, such as the dialog state, in the same response.

Important: If your skill uses Alexa Conversations, but not ACDL, see the instructions in Hand Off Dialog Management to and from Alexa Conversations.

Hand off dialog management from your skill to ACDL

To hand off dialog management from your skill to ACDL, send a Dialog.DelegateRequest to Alexa from an intent handler. Specify the utterance set to which ACDL must map the intent, and pass the slots to ACDL.

Note: The utterance set that you use with Dialog.DelegateRequest must include the Invoke APIs dialog act.

Dialog.DelegateRequest has the following format.

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "sessionAttributes": {},
  "response": {
    "directives":[
      {
         "type": "Dialog.DelegateRequest",
         "target": "AMAZON.Conversations",
         "period": {
            "until": "EXPLICIT_RETURN"
         },
         "updatedRequest": {
            "type": "Dialog.InputRequest",
            "input": {
               "name": "<namespace>.<utteranceSetName>",  // Utterance set must use the Invoke APIs dialog act
               "slots": {
                  "<slotName1>": {
                     "name": "<slotName1>",
                     "value": "<slotValue1>"
                  },
                  "<slotName2>": {
                     "name": "<slotName2>",
                     "value": "<slotValue2>"
                  },
                  ...
               }
            }
         }
      }
    ]
  }
} 

Examples of dialog management hand-off from your skill to ACDL

The following examples show how to switch the dialog manager to ACDL with slots or without slots.

Note: Any valid format supported for IntentRequest slot values is also acceptable for slot values used in the Dialog.InputRequest type of updatedRequest.

Example with slots

The following example delegates dialog management and passes slots to ACDL.

{
    "version": "1.0",
    "sessionAttributes": {},
    "response": {
        "directives": [
            {
                "type": "Dialog.DelegateRequest",
                "target": "AMAZON.Conversations",
                "period": {
                    "until": "EXPLICIT_RETURN"
                },
                "updatedRequest": {
                    "type": "Dialog.InputRequest",
                    "input": {
                        "name": "com.food.utterances.SetAllFavoriteFoodsUtteranceSet",
                        "slots": {
                            "breakfast": {
                                "name": "breakfast",
                                "value": "waffles"
                            },
                            "lunch": {
                                "name": "lunch",
                                "slotValue": {
                                    "type": "Simple",
                                    "value": "p. b. and j."
                                }
                            },
                            "dinners": {
                                "name": "dinners",
                                "slotValue": {
                                    "type": "List",
                                    "values": [
                                        {
                                            "type": "Simple",
                                            "value": "stuffed peppers"
                                        },
                                        {
                                            "type": "Simple",
                                            "value": "pizza"
                                        },
                                        {
                                            "type": "Simple",
                                            "value": "chicken cacciatore"
                                        }
                                    ]
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        ]
    }
} 

Example without slots

The following example delegates dialog management to ACDL but passes no slots.

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "sessionAttributes": {},
  "response": {
    "directives":[
      {
         "type": "Dialog.DelegateRequest",
         "target": "AMAZON.Conversations",
         "period": {
            "until": "EXPLICIT_RETURN"
         },
         "updatedRequest": {
            "type": "Dialog.InputRequest",
            "input": {
               "name": "<namespace>.<utteranceSetName>"
            }
         }
      }
    ]
  }
} 

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Last updated: Nov 27, 2023